The Shattered Blue Line
Patrick A. Davis
Pocket, Sept 2005, $7.99, 406 pp.
ISBN 0743499751

Major Nathan Malone, the Commander of the Office of Special Investigations, is jailed at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on a DWI charge. He fully expects to be discharged but instead Superintendent Crenshaw frees him and puts him in charge of working with the representative of Senator Smith involving sexual misconduct on the base. When he meets the senator's representative, he shocked to see a woman who looks like Christina Barlow, the only woman he ever loved. The woman was raped by three men never caught at the Air Force Academy.

The woman he sees is Christina's identical twin Kaitlin who blames the Academy for what happened to her sister. The investigation takes a sudden turn into murder when the cadets Mary and Rachel are killed. Rachel was pregnant but refused to name the father. Her roommate Mary was killed because the murderer believed she told Mary who the father was. Suspicion falls on Rachel's ex-boyfriend who never wanted the break-up but he is found dead along with an investigator assigned to watch him. Rachel's mother is also murdered and the wife of a suspect kills him and herself. With pressure to solve the case, Malone works a hunch that leads him to the killer but before an arrest can be made, more deaths follow.

Malone, a wealthy playboy, is portrayed as a good investigator but a terrible officer who frequently breaks the rules. Patrick A. Davis has written a crime thriller that is exciting, well plotted and with so many suspects hiding secrets that his investigation frequently spins out of control. Though the homicide count requires a serial killer calculator, THE SHATTERED BLUE LINE remains a mesmerizing military mystery.

Harriet Klausner